Crazy for Crawfish at The Hideaway

I'll make this short and sweet, because let's just get straight to the point here: The Hideaway on Dunvale served me the best and the largest crawfish I've had all season this past Sunday afternoon. We ate ten pounds, all said and done. And at $5.99 a pound (with corn and potatoes), it just might be some of the cheapest crawfish in town, too.

After I posted my initial list of the Top 10 crawfish joints in town this year, reader Susan e-mailed me to let me know I was missing a crucial spot: The Hideaway. After a few exchanged e-mails, I met up with her this past weekend to find out that she was as right as rain.

The Hideaway serves a full menu with daily specials like $12.99-a-pound lobster night on Thursdays and steak-and-a-baked-potato night on Tuesdays. But -- in season -- it sells the crawfish every single day starting at noon.

The crawfish come with ramekins of melted butter, so you can pretend you're eating tiny lobsters.

What makes these crawfish so special isn't just their size. It's the fact that they taste like the crawfish you get at friends' backyard boils, tended to with care, salted and seasoned properly inside and out.

It's how casually they're served, too, in big plastic Miller Lite buckets handed over with a big smile on the comfortable shaded patio. If you don't have a friend who does backyard crawfish boils, The Hideaway and its friendly faces are essentially the next best thing.

You can get more of that at-home feel this weekend, should you choose to head out this coming Saturday afternoon.

That's when The Hideaway is hosting a charity crawfish boil, where all-you-can-eat crawfish will cost $25 from 1 to 6 p.m. Last year, I'm told, they went through 2,900 pounds -- just so you can get an idea of how much the place and its patrons enjoy that crawfish.

And even if you don't make it out this Saturday, The Hideaway will still be serving crawfish for as long as they can get them fresh from Louisiana.

These truly were the best crawfish I've had all season and they were seasoned to perfection including being spiced with salt which is rare around here as most places just dump hot and spicy seasoning, failing to balance their boils.

I've been going to Bubba's near Memorial Park on Wednesdays and Thursdays.$4.99/lb gets you jumbo crawfish, corn and potatoes...and they have a nice patio where you can toss your cares to the wind and happily make a mess.